All Russian infrastructure of all types would be perfectly safe tomorrow if they just stopped brutally invading their neighbors. Let's be plain and clear here: the Russian moral position lies somewhere 10 miles below the floor of the deepest ocean trench. The moral high road is pretty easy to achieve.
I don‘t think „moral high roads“ have any relevance in context of this discussion. If such conversation triggers you, try to breathe and think why first.
Yes, I find that quite often morality becomes temporarily irrelevant when it's inconvenient for the party acting immorally.
Nevertheless, this is the one of the vanishingly few conflicts where there is a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes the universe gives us a break from endless grey areas. This is one of those!
If you find the idea of an autonomous sovereign state defending it's borders 'triggering' I might suggest some soothing jazz and a warm milk.
You are puzzled why Iran threatens the destruction of assets of powerful American oligarchs if policy changes aren't made? Allow me to point out that political leaders rely on the patronage those oligarchs and are strongly incentivized to do what they say.
Its exactly the right play for Iran to threaten but not do and hope that corporate greed panic does the work for them.
People in my life routinely talk about how lucky I am. Its a big enough thing that it's kind of a meme. I think a big part of it is strategic disassociation. You can't do it with every decision in your life but if you pick and choose some focal points where you just pick the choice with the unknown but possibly positive outcome, commit to it fully, and internalize the value of the joy of discovery without worrying about it too hard you often come out ahead.
We had a decent domestic transformer manufacturing ecosystem for decades, and all the major manufacturers shut down their NA plants and moved them to South America to make a little bit more money. The problem is, as it often is, the perverse incentives of the religion of quarterly earning reports.
Capitalism is a fire - if you tend it well and regulate it, it serves a useful function. Let it burn out of control and it will consume everything.
We should learn something from the Cuban heavy transformer manufacturing enterprise. I mean I get that critical theory is that easy, but the step everyone always seem to
miss is a credible explanation how a centrally managed command economy is better. There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
>>You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Sure you can. To everyone you run power lines to. Or did you mean you wanted a distribution system designed to profit you instead operate efficiently for everyone else?
> There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Part of that is because most of the world's power grids are extremely dumb. There's no visibility anywhere, certainly not in real time - if you're lucky, there is some sort of alert monitor for overtemperature in local transformers, but no voltage/current monitoring on an individual consumer level and no current monitoring on both sides of a transformer.
Imagine a small pole transformer plus secondary-side distribution lines rated and fused for 100 kVA. Enough for a few farms. Now farm A and B each install an 80 kVAp solar panel set - and farm C, D and E consume 50 kVA each. Without the decentralized solar, the pole transformer fuse would have been triggered - but now, there's 150 kVA of consumption going on, fed by the 160 kVA solar panels, on a distribution line only supporting 100 kVA, that's now acting as a fuse. An immediate risk of damage, if not outright fire.
That is why large scale solar/wind or large consumers all need permits, plannings and sometimes dedicated lines and transformers.
The only other way to run a system without creating tons of new infra but still able to catch such dangerous situations is a detailed (!) network map on the utility side plus realtime monitoring of the transformer and all five farms input/output currents.
> You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
While the actual economics of it may have been kneecapped, selling solar power back to the grid is very much a thing in 33 states. It's in the form of a credit and not cash. I'm not trying to nitpick, but I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Currently, probably yes. If American immigration policy was reshaped to favor immigration of people from high-performing societies, then it would be the opposite.
What color are the people in these 'high performing societies'? I think I have a guess.
Did 'high performing societies' build the railroads? Mine the steel? Forge it? Did 'high performing societies' build the culture we enjoy today?
Here's a secret that you should know but evidently life has never taught you: people who have to struggle to survive are generally smarter, more vigorous, more honorable people. They understand the toll in sweat and blood that the wrong decision takes. They are exactly who we need.
We don't need a nation of pampered trust fund man-children, turning up their delicate noses at everyone not a member of a 'high performing society'.
Its almost like LLMs have a vast, mute unconscious mind operating in the background, modeling relationships, assigning emotional state, and existing entirely without ego.
Sounds sort of like how certain monkey creatures might work.
I would absolutely not expect this, especially as long as Oracle and all the other technofeudalists are properly paying their taxes to the count and king.
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